Existing User

At the start of the twenty-first century, French art historian
and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman caused somewhat of a stir
with an essay about four photographs from the middle of the
twentieth century.1 The photographs, taken in 1944 by
Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, show the importance images
can have for understanding history. With his analysis and
reprinting of them, Didi-Huberman sought to expose the futility of
the claim that there is such a thing as the unimaginable. Finally,
these images show that the existence of an outside - of the camp,
of the image frame, of one's own subjectivity - is the ultimate
condition of resistance.

More or less at the same time as the publication of
Didi-Huberman's text, the Dutch artist Renzo Martens completed his
first video project, Episode I (2003), for which he
travelled to war-torn Chechnya. In this work, the artist entered
the image frame, filming himself among professional image producers
- photojournalists, cameramen and political and humanitarian
fieldworkers - and Chechen refugees. Four years later, for
Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) he repeated the
performance in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation immersed
in violence and trenchant iniquity, and which similarly exists in
the West via mediatisation of these miseries. By being on location
and becoming part of the images produced in the region, Martens not
only shows but also enforces the ongoing erasure of the 'outside'
for the people of Congo - an erasure conceived in terms of
globalisation, in that the reality of the Western capitalist world
has become part of the Congo's reality (through, amongst others,
development workers, economic investors, political involvement and
other professionals - including this

Footnotes

'Images malgré tout' was first published as an essay in Clément
Chéroux (ed.), Mémoires des camps: Photographies des camps de
concentration et d'extermination nazis (1933-1999) (exh.
cat.), Paris: Marval, 2001. The essay became the first part of a
book of the same title, published in 2003 by Les Éditions de
Minuit, Paris.↑

For a good account of how these images were made and came to be
published, see C. Chéroux (ed.), Mémoires des camps,
op. cit., pp.86-91.↑

See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences (1966), London and New York: Routledge,
2001, pp.3-18.↑

Foucault's conception of the painting's perspective is
inaccurate: the mirror doesn't reflect the viewer, but rather the
canvas Velázquez is painting inside the painting. See Joel Snyder
and Ted Cohen, 'Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Visual
Representation', Critical Inquiry, Winter 1980,
pp.429-47.↑

Ibid., p.82. Though Muselmann means 'Muslim'
in German, in the concentration camps it was the name given to the
prisoner who 'was giving up and was given up by his comrades […].
He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its
last convulsions.' Jean Amery, quoted in ibid., p.41.↑

It is interesting to refer here to a contract Martens made,
stating that part of his profits go to the Congolese he worked with
on this project. He actually made two contracts, fitting the
ambivalence of his film, increasing the percentage from donations
from 0% to 100%, with a guarantee of $500 if no donations are
received (both contracts are reproduced in A Prior, no.16,
2008, pp.174-75). With these contracts, Martens made the villagers
in his film shareholders of the work. He also sold some of the
pictures of the photographers in his film to collectors in Belgium,
of which the profits go to the Congolese photographers.↑